


Rumination

by wumbo_requiem



Category: Metalocalypse (Cartoon)
Genre: Death is the primary focus so please be careful., Gen, Going to Hell, Past Character Death, Post-Episode: s04 The Doomstar Requiem, Resurrection, WARNING: This story talks about death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 05:09:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29554023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wumbo_requiem/pseuds/wumbo_requiem
Summary: He could only think of death in terms of rooms.
Relationships: Magnus Hammersmith & Toki Wartooth
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	Rumination

**Author's Note:**

> Trying something new. Went a bit silly with the prose. The story's supposed to be a bit nonsensical, just let your imagination run free.

He could only think of death in terms of rooms.

Perhaps for some, death was fire-and-brimstone Hell, with ground cracking under the leaden feet of thousands of lifeless soldiers as they slaved away, pulling bricks— to build what, who knew?— under the dictatorship of a red, pointy-bearded cartoon devil— like how he always thought it would be. But it was not like that for him. 

Or maybe for some, death was an ocean. Maybe, for some, that ocean was frozen, and they were left to freeze and drown, trapped underneath a thick layer of ice and clawing to get out, to no avail, only to sink further into the aqueous depths. And maybe, for some, that oceanic death was more like a boiling pot on the stove, being intermittently stirred by some unknown but feared hand, like a stew, wherein the main ingredient was you.

But no. Magnus’ mind— or what was left of it— could not conjure up such imaginings to explain his suffering. No: his mind dealt him punishment in the form of rooms. Rooms that  _ resembled _ , but never  _ were _ , anything. 

The rooms never had anything in it that he could recognize as being his, nor were they interiors that he had seen before, at least not firsthand. They never had any entities in them that he would consider “people”, and there were never voices aside from his own. 

One room he’d been to had resembled that fire-and-brimstone Hell. The whole room, small and stone with the approximate proportions of a cube, was a fireplace. Fire engulfed almost the whole space, except for a tiny ledge. Even if he stood upon it, squished up against the wall flat as he could be, the flames still licked his back, singeing his hair and causing it to fall into the raging flame in black clumps that disintegrated into nothing. In the end it took about a foot off his length— his hair used to reach down to his buttocks, and although he’d never admit it, he’d been quite proud of it in life, so this greatly disheartened him.

Another room was much like the frozen lake. It was a meat freezer, like the kind found restaurant, but colder and far less forgiving. He could feel the breath within him taking crystalline form in his lungs. It was apparent that his fate— to be cooked and eaten, or not— was irrelevant. The only fact was that he was the meat. It played in his mind as he descended into a cold madness that froze his every orifice shut. I am the meat. I am the meat. I am

There were millions of rooms like this. Every time he regenerated, he was tortured within an inch of his “life” (though this was merely a simulation of life, he knew that), and regenerated again in perfect form, only to be re-tortured and so on and so forth. He was at his wit’s end. Frankly he’d reached the end of that spool in life, but his situation only made it worse and worse. 

It was like a cruel video game, wherein the rooms were the levels. But the levels never repeated, and he never got the chance to learn the rules or strategize a way out, to avoid falling into the depths again. Each regeneration was madness. He could not avoid the Game Over screen. He was stuck in the cycle.

That was, until he felt a shock of lightning that split him down the middle and lit up his every nerve like a Christmas tree. This shock didn’t come from one of his rooms. 

Subsequently, he entered a room that was different from the rest. Well, they were all different, but this one was unique in that it had people in it, and that it wasn’t actively trying to kill him.

At first, admittedly, he didn’t think they were actual people. They moved about in their black-veiled forms like demons in his adjusting vision, with only tiny angular slits of light for eyes. But they came with voices, and he realized after some time that they meant no harm to him. Was this a joke? He was waiting for the malicious intent of the room, whatever form it might take this time, to swallow him up screaming, but it never came.

He started to get the idea that maybe this  _ wasn _ ’t one of the death rooms. The rooms usually only served to slowly deteriorate him, but this one was actively making his condition  _ better. _ There were a few signs of evidence that pointed to this. 

First was the repetitive, mechanical beeping from somewhere beside or behind him. It was the sound of somewhere he’d been at least once before but hardly remembered— personal memories weren’t even within his realm of capability thus far— a hospital, where people generally went to improve their health. Or die, he thought, but another piece of evidence stopped his thought in its tracks.

Hooked up to him were tangles of tubes, delivering him what he could assume was some kind of medicine, because that’s what they gave you in hospital rooms. While the medecine deposited somewhere in his arm, semi liquefied nutrients went directly into his digestive tract. Yum-my, he hummed in his head.

It wasn’t long before this too-dark room went black. And he awaited regeneration, to come paired with the realization that this had simply been a save point in the game. And he figured, no he  _ knew _ , that the next room, in juxtaposition to this one, would bring him pain beyond belief; the worst yet, if that was even possible.

But that worse fate never came.

There were no rooms, there were no stars, only the blackness that enveloped him and allowed him, finally,  _ finally _ , to rest. 

  
  


Somehow, the rooms were getting better. And not by just a little bit, but exponentially, it seemed. For when he woke up next, he was in a  _ warm _ room, in another bed, but one where he wasn’t attached to anything. He looked around as his eyes adjusted to the light— and found that the source of the light was a window. This room had a  _ view _ , and it was the first room where he could see  _ beyond _ the room. It was a mind-bending concept to him. How much real time had passed since his death, he didn’t know— “real time” was another concept that was way outside his grasp— but in that time, he had forgotten that there could be something, you know, beyond anything. A world beyond the walls he was trapped in. there were voices, too, beyond the walls. But even as footsteps outside the room encroached and diminished, he could not make out what the voices were saying. The only thing he knew was the voices themselves. 

He was starting to really think that maybe, somehow, he wasn’t dead anymore. He didn’t understand why or how such a thing had happened, and he did not possess the mental power to even begin to unravel this mystery.

In fact, he was so depleted, physically and mentally, that his mind easily slipped back into the blackness. It was much like the dark void he had experienced after the hospital room, and since he had now seen it twice, he knew he had to be alive. This was sleep, black space with no light, like being trapped inside of an ink bottle. Sweet, sweet blackness, a blackness he knew well. Sleep was a blackness that could be perceived, if only subconsciously, but he knew he was in it. Because when he woke up— and yes, he was  _ waking up _ now and not being forcefully re-strung together and rebirthed into another dreadful hellscape— he felt rested and good. 

This room was the same as the last, as he could tell from his periphery, but his vision was focused on something else, something right in front of him. Right now, here in the sanctuary of someone else's bedroom, was the first time since death that he had seen a human face. 

The face was that of an older man, maybe around his age, a face sharpened by prominent bones and sagged by lines and folds, with lips embracing an unmoving scowl. Curls of softlooking, dark brown and grey hair framed the face, stuck to it in some places. A hand came up then, to brush a piece of it away from the pronounced cheekbone and tuck it behind the year. Simultaneously, his own hand felt something soft, hairlike even. And, wait a minute. 

The eyes were eerily familiar, and odd. Odd in the sense that they were in fact different colours, one being a dark, polished stonelike brown, and the other being glacier white and unpunctuated by a pupil. 

He blinked, and stared at the man. He closed his left eye, and the other man’s eyelid drooped over the bluish white iris. 

Wait a minute, wait a minute. Just wait a second. 

Something was tugging at him, recognition, although its form was hazy and didn’t fully come to him yet. Until.

He opened his eye and closed the other one, and the whole room went dark. 

And he remembered: he couldn’t see out of the other eye, and hadn't been able to in life after a certain point in his mid-thirties. It was just starting to come back to him, who he was, and who he had been. He could only remember bits and pieces, and it was frustrating.

But he knew one thing undoubtedly: The man he was staring at now, the man with a shocked and confused expression, was him. 

A hand, his hand, came down upon the mirror and smacked it into his lap, and his breath became uneasy. At first, he looked down at his hands, which were as craggy as his face and even bonier, with nails that were clean but in need of a trim. It was overwhelmingly clear to him that his whole body was clean, which wouldn’t be so significant, if at the time of his death he had been clean. But, he remembered suddenly, that in his moment of death, he had been utterly filthy, covered in blood, dust, chunks of stone, bits of glass… and now he was spotless. 

And then, to steady himself, he looked around again. The room offered nothing new from the last time he’d been here, though now he was conscious enough to take in some of the details; a shelf full of what honestly looked like children’s toys, a model of an aircraft flying high over the bed, a desk with familiar yet foreign instruments on it, and of course, the window, from which soft light poured. 

There was someone else in the room, and he knew this because there was a hand within his field of vision which wasn’t his own. The hand picked the mirror in his lap up by the handle, and put it on the bedside table with a dull metal _ thunk _ . His eyes studied the hand, which had small, irregular white scars in places, and perfectly healthy looking skin in others. Round, filed nails. His eyes trailed from the nail beds, to the knuckles, up the back of the hand to the wrist, up the forearm to the elbow, up the upper arm until it ascended into a blue cotton sleeve. He followed along the line of the shoulder to the breast, up the neck until he reached the chin, then stopped. Almost scared to look at the face, he hesitated, then finally, he looked.

No… why was it him? 

He stared at the face. It was one painfully familiar to him (although, he couldn’t place the name), one he understood intimately. Familiar, but different, in ways.

The two wiry hair strands that had run from the sides of the man’s mouth to his chin were merely the framework of what had now become a beard. Not a full, bushy one, or anything close, but one that was trimmed short and clean. It suited the overall squareness of the face, but aged him up a few years. 

Two blue eyes Magnus had seen peer up at him in many situations now peered down into his. They sat where they should, those blue eyes: between the ears and above the nose and below the brow. But the brow sagged, pinched inward, in a way he had never seen it before, like a worried little ledge over the eyes. The lines between the brows were deep trenches carved from worry, fear, all the things that contorted ones face into a brand new shape, one resembling the original but never again the same.

One of them had to speak first, and Magnus was getting tired of waiting for the other person to speak up. Though he thought his throat was too dry to speak, his head was too full for him not to try. So he hummed low in his throat, almost as if he was clearing it, to assure himself that yes, his vocal cords still worked, and he opened his parched mouth.

“What time is it?”

It was the first question he thought to ask. The most immediate one that made any sense.

The other man’s mouth contorted into a smile that made him wish for— not death, as he knew how that was, and it was not pleasant, but rather— that sweet deathlike blackness. If only he could pass out right now, but his adrenaline levels made sure that he stayed wide awake.

“Magnus!” Was the answer. 

Despite the situation, Magnus laughed. His own comeback, half-formed in his own head, and the impending back-and-forth of a human conversation, was making him delirious. 

“I asked you the time,” he laughed, “the time’s not ‘Magnus’.”

“You wokes up!” This time when the man spoke, his voice was like a warped record, wobbling as it made sound. It made him uneasy, because he was pretty sure  _ he _ was the reason for this sudden shift in pitch, and he had a bad feeling about why. “You finally wokes up.” 

“Yeah, but when?” He asked, actually wanting to know how much real time had passed since. Well, you know.

The man sniffed. “Nine-thirties in the mornings.”

It occurred to him that that didn’t actually answer his question. He just hadn’t asked the right one.

“Huh. What. Year?” He tried.

“Uhm?” The other man nervously laughed. “Twenty fourteens.”

Oh, thank fuck. That was, to his limited recollection, current year. The month didn’t matter at this point, although the beard told him it had been a few. 

“Thank God,” he said, although he didn’t believe in a God, and relaxed his tense chest and back with a deflating exhale. The next question came easier. “What am I doing here?”

The man smiled again. “I broughts you to my rooms when they said you were done in the hoskpitals. That was only yesterday. You’s been sleepin’ for a long time!”

No, no. That wasn’t what he had meant, either. 

“Thanks,” he said, first and foremost. “But I mean… what am I doing…  _ alive _ ? Because I wasn’t. For uh, a long time.”

“That’s true. Buts, Toki wouldn’t lets it stay that way.”

The pin keeping Magnus’ fragile consciousness together was pulled, and he shattered. 

Without the name, the handsome not-stranger was, well, just that. A familiar face, one he knew he had wronged somehow, which knowledge came as a gut feeling more than something he could put into words. But the man putting a name to himself changed everything. It kicked something inside of him, hard, creating a force that made his rusty gears turn, and grate on each other until the lights flickered on in his memory. Visions flashed before him, flashbacks of his previous life, specifically Toki’s role in it, and he started to feel heavier as if weighed down by metal. Water trickled down his face without him making a sound.

No. Not him. Not  _ him _ . Why did it have to be  _ him _ ?

Toki stayed calm somehow, serenely patting Magnus’ shoulder, while he felt his body tense up with regret, guilt,  _ shame _ . 

Tears became sobs, became ugliness that he wished Toki didn’t have to see. A hand caressed Magnus’ back and his sobs morphed into screams, yet the touch was unwaveringly gentle. Touch, human touch, sent him past the brink of sanity, for he hadn’t encountered it in such a long, torturous time that he thought he’d never feel it again. Touch, coming as close as the stuff that makes us will allow.

A silence followed the noise, bringing peace and equilibrium. A silence that Magnus had craved, like the black tar of sleep.

“Magnus,” Toki said when it was over, when it was quiet. “What ams death like?”

Maybe in another life, Magnus would have acted differently in that moment. Not maybe, definitely. He would have screamed at Toki, threatened him, told him never to ask him such a silly thing ever again, because how the Hell would he know? God, he would have mumbled under his breath, what an idiot. But, it was different now, and Magnus couldn’t fully comprehend why he had been like that. He wasn’t himself quite yet, but the derivative of a much angrier, more volatile man. A man he would have to relearn to be, because his brain had been unwired and rewired until he hardly knew who he was. 

But now, he did know the answer to Toki’s question. Not the answer Toki was looking for— some universal catch-all definition that would put to rest humanity’s biggest question since the dawn of time. But he knew death was infinite, and he knew it was real, and he knew it was a rational thing to be afraid of. 

So he told him.

“Well. I think it might be different for everyone, but for me, it was like…” 

And then he stopped. 

He could sit there recount every detail of his repeated imprisonment to Toki, tell him his harrowing tale of death and rebirth and redeath. But he looked at those expectant eyes. They weren’t expectant in a perverse way, but mostly anxious. They belonged to a man who didn’t  _ want _ to hear his answer. Not his real answer, anyway. The concerned lines of his face betrayed him, as if he was  _ scared _ to hear what Magnus had to say.

He swallowed, reconsidering, rerouting, rewiring. 

“You might have heard that life is like a series of doors, or something like that.”

“... Yeah?... Ands?”

“Well, death is sort of similar to that. Only those doors don’t ever lead to anything good, and they only work one way.” 

Toki nodded, following, to the best of his ability. Magnus didn’t expect him to fully understand what he was explaining in his abstract way, and hoped he never did. 

“I openeds the last one for yous,” Toki mused.

“Hm. I suppose I should be grateful.”

  
  


After silence settled over the two once more, Magnus closed his eyes. A dull pain was starting to awaken in his core, and he didn’t bother trying to move. He wished for nothing more than to fall back to sleep, and figured he was on the brink of it once he got his breathing to slow down to an easy pace. But it never came, and that frustrated him. Before, it had been so easy to just let go. For the time being, he remained lying there with his eyes closed, as relaxed as he could get.

It only lasted about a minute. Knowing that Toki was there made him vaguely uneasy. The man hadn’t said a word in a long time. Was he watching him? Magnus didn’t open his eyes. Not yet.

Something was… wrong.

As soon as Magnus got the unshakeable feeling, he opened his eyes, jolted as if woken up from a bad dream, though sleep had not been kind enough to greet him. His eyes darted to Toki, who hadn’t moved, and was slumped over in his chair, with his eyes open. He didn’t even appear to be breathing.

But it was fine, right? Magnus had seen— or at least, as far as he could remember, he thought he had seen— Toki do weirder things. Though today he had done some of the strangest, least explicable things to date. The more Magnus sat there, thinking about it, the more uneasy he got, and the deeper the pit in his stomach widened. What was Toki doing with that mirror before? Why had he brought Magnus here? Why was it  _ his _ call to bring him back to life? And why the hell wasn’t he breathing.

No, something was  _ definitely _ wrong about this. 

Panicking, Magnus jumped out of bed— so, his legs  _ did _ work, although not very well. He stumbled and caught himself on the back of Toki’s chair. Wavering, he placed his hand on Toki’s shoulder.

“Toki! Are you in there?” He asked.

In response, Toki began to disintegrate. 

Oh God, no. 

The ashes— dust? — of his friend flew straight through his fingertips and flew past Magnus in a terrible whirlwind. Some of them got in his mouth, his hair, his shirt. He tried in vain to spit them out. They tasted disgusting. They tasted of death.

  
  


A blinding whiteness like a dying star engulfed everything, dissolving the rest of the room until it was abstract shapes, then colour, then nothing. Magnus knew this whiteness, and he knew it was all over. He was sadly not new to the hot, sharp pain that stabbed through his body and tore him apart limb from limb, tissue from tissue, atom from atom, until he was molecular compounds and bits of stardust that could be rearranged to look the same way as before. His consciousness remained throughout this process, floating through nausea-inducing white nothingness while his body reformed. And with anger just as white hot as the light surrounding him, he knew he had been played for a fool. He had never been revived, not even for a second. And yet it all felt so  _ real _ . Toki’s touch felt more real to him than hellfire or freezing death, yet it was just as much of an illusion.

He hated to admit that it was clever, but he had to hand it to the powers that be. This was the cruelest room they had thrown at him. And it wasn’t long before he would be taken to another. 

In the seconds he had left before some new unimaginable horror became his reality, he thought of Toki. Even if “today” was only an illusion, having one friend to think of was comforting. 

Hey, Toki. Thanks for trying to save me, Toki. Even though you really didn’t. I appreciate it anyways. I’m sorry for what I did to you. I’m sure it was really fucked up and horrible. I can’t remember.

The walls began to form around him, a cube to be filled with what he couldn’t yet make out. Knowing whatever it was would be awful, he squeezed his eyes shut, and hoped with every part of his being that it would be over soon. 

_ This  _ is what death is like, Toki. I hope you never have to see it.

**Author's Note:**

> did someone get the pun in the title pls tell me im funny and cool in the comments below <3


End file.
